Summer Love
by Srebrna
Summary: Lizzy is an assistant, William is the lazy son of the boss. Written, but not used, for Meryton AHA "June Love" theme.


_This is a bit of a story that began as June Love in Meryton AHA forum, but was never finished. William Darcy is a spolit, lazy boss, and Elizabeth Bennet is his secretary/assistant, in fact doing all the work._

_Will probably never be finished 'cause I somehow lost the drive to do it. Maybe someday._

If she looks at me like this again, I'm going to explode. Or grab her, strip her of this city camouflage grey blouse, grey denims, grey jacket and those stupid plastic-rimmed glasses and kiss her senseless.

Oh my God, she is tapping the desk with her pencil. She was saying something. I'm sure she was saying something, but I was focusing on the way her lips move when she bites them in concentration or opens them to pronounce that perfect, rounded and incredibly sensual "Oou" sound whenever she finds something fascinating in one of those abysmally boring spreadsheets.

"Mr Darcy, I know you have a- a meeting planned in an hour" she gracefully managed to omit the word "party" but I hear the condescension in her voice quite clearly. "Please _try_ to concentrate now and I'll try to be as concise as I can. Under circumstances."

I get it. I know. I just... Well. I need some time, dammit, to became whatever it is my father wants me to be. Manager, boss, I don't even remember how this position is called in the local jargon.

She sticks the pencil in her hair repeatedly and I wonder if she wants to stick it in something else. Like, my heart.

Until today, I thought she actually may like me. Not like a boss who appreciates her work, gives her appropriate budget for nearly anything she thinks up, gives the employees the raises she asked for (and some additional benefits) and gives her challenges. I thought she liked me, as, well, me. After all, most girls I met liked me. Or so I thought.

As I am a self centered and – how did she phrase it? - hormone-driven overgrown teenager I never thought to look any further than surface of most things. So now I'm here, wanting to get under the surface (and clothes, preferably all) of my dressed-like-a-nun subordinate instead of romancing yet another empty-headed socialite on my private beach.

When did my illumination start? Actually, yesterday evening. I left my cell at "my" office and went there long after anyone should have been gone.

Should being the most important word.

As I strolled down the corridor, I noticed a sliver of light coming from the office next to mine and heard a raised, emotional voice. This was the first time I actually heard her curse. Or exclaim. Or show _any_ kind of emotion.

"_He thinks he is God's gift to women, Jane. Ooooh, I could just... Well, I won't. You know this. I need this work and I won't blow it by going on personal war path against him. But he is just so, so, so infuriating! He has everything! His daddy **gave** him money for college, for holiday and now the position here with apparently enough money for him to fool around **and** pay me for doing, basically, his job. Plus a summary for him. I feel like an author of CliffsNotes for particularly resistant students. I know, Jane. But I can't help but feel, well... I got my degrees by working like a slave for five years and he got his exactly how? And he is so standoffish. He won't visit the factory. I always feel he is checking if he didn't get his pretty summer suit dirty when he comes to the main office" she paused and listened. Now I saw her, moving in front of the crack in the door, the sharp light from the desk lamp going right through her god awful shirt..._

_I think my brain actually short-circuited and when it was functioning again (as the blood took some time to come back to it) I heard her say:_

"_...only as long as he pays me. I'll let you know when I'm going home as soon as I know it, but it will be at least two months more, I think. I finally got the salaries as high as people really needed them to be in order to get them to put more effort and personal insight into the job. I know this is a boring, manual work and I have no knowledge about the technical side, but several of them came up with various improvements already. We have cut down the use of water by 15% already as one workstation is now sharing their water supply with several others... I saw the numbers for the last week and I'm amazed – 10% more ready or semi-finished goods, lower amount of wastage and even less time taken off for personal reasons. I can't account for it in any other way – they were awfully underpaid. I don't know who set the salaries so low but I wouldn't put it past the previous manager to misrepresent the local employment situation to the main management in order to manipulate the pay rates. Well, now it's fixed, thanks to our nice, absent-minded boss. I don't think he actually knew what he was agreeing to..."_

_She moved again and again I lost the thread, most blood rushing away from my brain._

"_...sorry, Jane. I had no idea..." pause, she wiped her nose on a tissue, was she crying? "...when I get home, I'll bring some of the local wine and we'll get totally wasted. Men are not worth crying over, Janey. I'll buy you some outrageous example of local native couture if it makes you happy... Ok, ok, I won't. Stop this. Yes, I'll find some. Ok, I have to finish. No, I won't kill him. If I did, nobody would pay me, after all. He can stay on his beach, with all these girls trying to get into his wallet and pants – order unimportant – and I'm going to do my work, even though nobody will ever know and he will get all credit for it."_

Well, now I know the shape she hides – parts of it, and these parts look nice and rounded. And I admit that if she went around dressed for the climate our workers would probably have hard time concentrating on their tasks.

Dammit, I have hard time concentrating on _anything_, wondering what exactly I would find if I managed to get her tightly-knotted bun down and all her layers of clothes off. Would her hair reach her butt? What shape is said butt? Small and flat, or curvy and generous? How long are her legs? She doesn't wear high heels, so I know how tall she is – and it isn't very – and I know she is pretty strong in her hands. Other than that... my brain collects small bits of information about her as I catch them. It tries to supply the parts that I still miss, but under these clothes she may be anything, from anorectically thin to plumply overweight. I'm leaning towards the second option. Also, if she was, it's always nicer...

Damn. She is talking again. Doesn't she know what she does to me? Her voice, touching some deeply-hidden part of my brain, inherited from all my noble ancestors who conquered and ruled, stirring the instinct to fight...

"I see" she sets her teeth and sighs deeply. "Go. We'll talk tomorrow. I'm sure I can manage on my own in the morning. Please come around 11, we should be done by then."

I gather she is somewhat disappointed. She wanted me to help her decide on something. Shit.

"I'm sorry, miss Bennet. I was..."

"Yeah, whatever" I hear her mutter and I swallow, hard. She dismisses my explanations with a shrug.

I love the way she shrugs. I love the way she takes off her glasses and taps her nose with their side. I love the way she peers, short-sightedly, at something outside the window. I love...

_Shit. Shitshitshit._

I watch her as she gathers the papers, not looking at me even once.

"Miss Bennet" I begin, putting on my best charming smile and forcing my voice to this smooth, calm baritone most girls appreciated until now. "I'm sorry I didn't attend. There is nothing I can say except that I'm too easily distracted by visual stimuli." She rolls her eyes. I love the way... "I'll get a piece of paper and a pen and I hope this will help me to understand..."

She sighs, making her breasts move under three layers of cloth.

"Very well" she rubs her nose. "But I need a coffee. I'll be back in a few."

"No, please. I force you to repeat this, the least I can do is to get you coffee. Half milk, two sugars?"

She looks genuinely amazed at the fact that I remember how she takes her coffee and nods slowly.

In the evening I'm going through the events of the day and I still don't know what happened. She is not a beauty – her mouth is too wide, her front teeth show too much when she speaks, she wears clothes resembling something my great-aunt could have in her wardrobe. Baggy pockets on her jackets, baggy trousers, everything in grays, beiges and browns. No decided black, no blues, as if she wanted to blend in with the office surroundings as much as possible. Her hair is always done up in a tight knot, she sticks pencils in it when she is preoccupied even. She wears no make-up, not even slightest trace of eyeliner. Since this... obsession started, I espied her using only a few cosmetics – she surely uses some perfume, as the office is saturated with the grassy, greeny, even cucumbery scent, she also uses hand cream every time she washes her hands and puts lots of sunscreen when leaving the office.

But what it is in her that makes me stay in the place I wanted to avoid in the first place? This was supposed to be a holiday of my dreams, with several of my friends and some girls over for boat rides, beach volleyball, dance evenings and long nights of drinking and partying.

Instead my cousin and my friends are now out there, having fun and I'm sitting here, in my room, alone, analysing the behaviour of my employee and trying to understand my attraction to her. Also, her now obvious lack of attraction to me.

Why do I feel like a schoolboy who failed his favourite teacher? I never needed anyone to approve of my achievements and suddenly I feel I just must prove to her that I'm not the lazy layabout whose father gave him a position...

..._shit_. I _am_ a lazy layabout. And as to my father...

Richard opens my door with a thud, interrupting perhaps the most important thought of the evening.

"Willie-boy" he slurs. "What the hell are you doing here? Rose-Marie has been asking for you the whole evening. She couldn't believe you stayed at the office with that sexless manager of yours" he leans in the doorway. "So, what did you do? Found a new girl somewhere on the island?"

"Stop it, Rick" I growl, not looking up. "I'm trying to... I'm trying to understand one document she gave me."

"So you actually did spend the whole afternoon with her? How was she?" he smiles knowingly. "Did you manage to corrupt the good little MBA student, or did you find out she is actually a male?"

After another two weeks I'm ready to shoot someone. Her, myself or Rick. Or Caroline, if she calls me again. Or Rose-Marie, if I find her in my bed yet again.

I'm sitting in her office, analysing the financial report she prepared, fully aware that I'm redoing my basic finance course and I feel, yet again, like a schoolboy. She has this look which says she expected more of me.

"Miss Bennet, I'm trying to..." the door burst open, letting in an overgrown young man in a pair of dusty dungarees and sweaty t-shirt. "Oh, I'm sorry. Didn't want to interrupt, but we have a small problem in the factory and the boss is asking for Miss Bennet to come and solve it."

She raises and looks at me expectantly.

Now, I'm not an office-only guy, but... factories are something I don't really relish in visiting.

I'm officially mad. I am attracted to a girl with no fashion sense, no style, no standing in society and my subordinate. She is quiet as a mouse for most of the time, doesn't express her emotions with anything more than a sigh or a smirk. These smirks bug me. I never know if she is actually laughing at me or she is covering some other feelings with them.

I decide to apply to my studies. Not only to the fast-tract repetition of most of my MBA course – in a way I never expected to go through it, on live data and with a teacher I can't impress with my dad's name (now I understand that most of my school life went much easier because of this) but also to my study of a woman's nature. One woman's nature.

We sit in the office, looking through some reports she prepared. I've been spending more and more time here, even though Rick wants me out there, with my guests. But I don't think about them. They may go and drown themselves for all I care. What I want - what I have to achieve - is to get this infuriating little woman to _react_.

She is soooo calm. Soooo self-reliant. Also, she is case-and-people-oriented, doesn't like small talk, simply hates people who are late, appreciates getting her coffee hot and doesn't drink alcohol. Also, she is unimpressed. By me, by Rick (she actually tries not to come into contact with him too much), by Caroline, by Rose-Marie (both tried to intimidate her by blitzkrieging her with fashion advice, she didn't even bat an eye). She is so unimpressed that I have to remind myself of the overheard conversation to make sure I remember she is actually a human being.

She is so unimpressed that I make it my personal goal for the rest of our stay here - which is five weeks by now - to finally impress her. _Somehow_.

I've already tried inviting her to dinner (declined, very nicely, but decidedly), inviting her to lunch (explained that the nearest eatery doesn't really suit her), ordering a takeaway (accepted nicely and ate it with me in the office kitchen, surrounded by two dozens other people), taking her to the cinema, theatre and local dance troupe show (either individually or in large groups - accepted when the group was larger than 5) or just organising a picnic for the whole office staff. It is to happen today and that was why we are now poring over a stack of papers thicker than my wrist and trying to work through it in record time.

What makes me even more intrigued is that she apparently needs the money she earns (as she admitted on phone to Jane, whoever that may be) but she made no movement that would lead her to _marry_ the money she needs.

Sometimes I feel as if she didn't even recognise my gender. I'm a sexless "boss". Can anything be more humiliating?


End file.
